“Do you recognize me?” The artist Suzanne Valadon asked this of a journalist while they hunched over a reproduction of Auguste Renoir’s Danse à la ville (City Dance) (1883) in her studio around 1920. “The female dancer who smiles while falling into the arms of the male dancer,” she added. “That’s me.” 1 As an aspiring artist in Paris during the 1880s, Valadon had supported herself by modeling professionally for Renoir, as well as Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and other prominent artists. Modeling, she recalled, was physically and emotionally demanding work, with lengthy sessions in which an employer “would ask me to give him an attitude, a movement, a gesture.” 2

But between modeling sessions, it was Valadon who sought to capture the movements and gestures of her family, friends, and neighbors in Montmartre, the working-class district where she lived nearly her entire life. Having sketched since age nine, Valadon began to draw and paint the human figure with growing seriousness, focusing on women and children in her economically precarious, socially marginal, and culturally vibrant community. Using graphite and charcoal, pastel and oil paint, she studied the members of the hardscrabble households in the area—in particular, her own. In works such as Two Studies of Maurice Utrillo Nude Drying Himself (c. 1892–94), Valadon pictures the frail limbs and stooped posture of her young son with narrow, angular lines that emphasize his bony frame. Maurice appears vulnerable yet resilient, like the domestic and service workers who populated his mother’s drawings.

Parisians had their first opportunity to view works by Valadon in 1894, when she exhibited five drawings at the prestigious Salon de la Société National des Beaux-Arts. She had been encouraged to participate in the Salon by a colleague and patron, the artist Edgar Degas. “From time to time in my dining room,” Degas wrote to Valadon after purchasing a work of hers, “I look at your drawing in red pencil, still hanging, and I always say to myself: ‘This devil…had the genius of drawing.’ Why don’t you show me something else?” 3 Through her friendship with Degas, Valadon soon did embark on something else: printmaking.

Her swift mastery of the medium is evident in an etching from 1895, Catherine Nude Combing Her Hair. Wielding the etching needle like a pencil, Valadon renders an intimate moment in a bare apartment with firm lines, insistent shading, and repeated forms. From the curved contours of the tub and the bowl to the rounded buttocks, stomach, and breasts of the figure between them, recurring shapes connect the body of the model—posed by a local cleaning woman named Catherine—to the everyday objects around her.

Valadon returned to a similar theme in Marie Bathing with a Sponge (1908), though she used a different printmaking technique: drypoint. With drypoint, a needle is used to incise lines on a metal plate. While in etching the raised edges alongside these incised marks are scraped away, in drypoint the edges are maintained so as to generate lines of different widths and textures. Valadon capitalizes on the full potential of drypoint in this work, describing the figure, tub, and garment with an array of lines that are variously thin and thick, hard and soft, dense and sparse. Notably, wide and downy contours encircle the figure, defining her raised arm, curled back, and bent legs. With these contours, the artist both attracts and obstructs the eye, accentuating the supple physique of the nude model while at the same time creating a potent visual barrier between model and viewer.

Indeed, this duality in Valadon’s extensive drawn, printed, and painted body of work has led critics and scholars to propose that the artist developed a radically modern approach to the female nude, one shaped by her gender and class identification with her subjects. To Valadon, familiar with the risks and rewards of self-exposure through modeling, every line was informed by complexity and consequence.

Annemarie Iker, Mellon-Marron Research Consortium Fellow, Department of Drawings and Prints

  1. Suzanne Valadon quoted in André Tabarant, “Suzanne Valadon et ses souvenirs de modèle,” Bulletin de la vie artistique (15 December 1921), 627.

  2. Ibid, 628

  3. Edgar Degas quoted in Robert Rey, Suzanne Valadon (Paris: Editions de la Nouvelle Revue Française, 1922), 9.

Wikipedia entry
Introduction
Suzanne Valadon (23 September 1865 – 7 April 1938) was a French painter who was born Marie-Clémentine Valadon at Bessines-sur-Gartempe, Haute-Vienne, France. In 1894, Valadon became the first woman painter admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. She was also the mother of painter Maurice Utrillo. Valadon spent nearly 40 years of her life as an artist. The subjects of her drawings and paintings, such as Joy of Life (1911), included mostly female nudes, portraits of women, still lifes, and landscapes. She never attended the academy and was never confined within a set tradition or style of art. Despite not being confined to any tradition, she shocked the artistic world as the first woman painter to depict a male nude as well as less idealized images of women in comparison to those of her male counterparts. She was a model for many renowned artists. Among them, Valadon appeared in such paintings as Dance at Bougival (1883) and Dance in the City by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1883), and Suzanne Valadon (1885) and The Hangover (Suzanne Valadon) (1887 - 1889) by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
Wikidata
Q156889
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License
Getty record
Introduction
The self-taught painter was first known in Montmartre as an artists' model. She posed for Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec and other painters who associated at the Lapin Agile cabaret. She showed paintings at the Salon des Indépendants from 1909 to 1911, but Her talent as a painter was only recognized in the 1920s. She is the mother of the painter Maurice Utrillo.
Nationality
French
Gender
Female
Roles
Artist, Sitter, Etcher, Painter, Pastelist, Pastellist, Model
Names
Suzanne Valadon, Marie Clementine Valadon, Maria Clémentine Valadon, Suzanne Valadon Utter, Suzanne (Maria Valentine) Valadon, Marie Clémentine (Suzanne) Utter-Valadon, Maria Valadon, Maria Valentine, Valadon
Ulan
500032597
Information from Getty’s Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License

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